Now that the first month of the new year in the new decade has come to an end, a first month that has brought much to mourn and not much to celebrate, I've been thinking again about hope. What some were calling "Hopenhagen," did not, as we all know, and perhaps should have known from the start, provide much reason for real hope. Daily there are more reasons to be worried -- not just about climate change, but about genetically modified foods, ever-increasing rates of cancer, a great wave of extinction, the death of the oceans, and a hundred other …